In the Community

A Helping Hand

UMass Lowell students have joined together across majors to design, build and donate prosthetic devices for children.

eNABLE Lowell is a local chapter of a global nonprofit volunteer organization that provides 3D printed prosthetic devices to children around the world.

Mechanical Engineering Department faculty and students are actively involved in their field and their community.

Below are only a few of the great things our faculty and students have been up to recently!

Faculty News and Awards in the Community

The partnership with the Army Natick Labs through HEROES continues to grow with the funding of "Air Drop". The first two projects funded under the cooperative agreement are "Parachute Suspension Line Braid Architecture and the Resulting Fluid-Structure Interaction" under the direction of Prof. James Sherwood (ME) and Asst. Prof. David Willis (ME), and "Shelf Life Quantification & Analysis of Polypropylene-Fabric Parachutes: Macroscopic Approach" under the direction of Assoc. Prof. Ramaswamy Nagarajan (Plastics) and Asst. Prof. Alireza Amirkhizi (ME).

Asst. Prof. Christopher Hansen is one of seven young faculty researchers nationwide awarded a NASA Early Career Faculty Space Technology Research Grant. The program is designed to accelerate the development of innovative technologies originating from academia that address high-priority needs for America's space program as well as other government agencies and the commercial flight industry.

Prof. Christopher Niezrecki and Asst. Prof. Ioannis Raptis were among four UMass Lowell Engineering faculty awarded "Quantitative Sensing of Bridges, Railways, and Tunnels with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" through Research and Innovative Tech Administration (RITA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

A new research center led by UMass Lowell and supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, WindSTAR, was established earlier this year with the goal of enhancing research and development in the field of wind energy and providing world-class training to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Student News and Awards in the Community

ME students Taylor Breau, Anthony Ferrara, Jonathon Fournier, Johnathan Lawson, and Patrick Semeter won the 2015 SME Direct Digital Manufacturing Design Competition. The team, advised by Asst. Prof. Stephen Johnston (Plastics), designed a 3D printed prosthetic for a dog. The award was presented at RAPID 2015 in Long Beach, CA this past May.

The UMass Lowell Design-Build-Fly team had a successful showing at the 2015 competition in Tuscon, AZ: 24th place out of 84 teams. Unofficially, the UMass Lowell team was fourth among colleges without a formal aeronautical/aerospace program, and top from the U.S. Great work to the entire team, manager Evan Brown, as well as advisor Asst. Prof. David Willis.

Teams which either included or were entirely made up of Mechanical Engineering students took First, Second, People's Choice, and the Graduate Level awards in the UMass Lowell Engineering Prototyping Competition which took place on December 1, 2015.

Service Learning

For many years, the Mechanical Engineering Department has been active in the field of service-learning and, as part of the Peru UMass Lowell Project, we have sent two interdisciplinary teams a year to the Peruvian Andes, to bring electricity and clean water to remote villages. The Department has also been involved with SLICE, a major curriculum development initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation which seeks to incorporate service-learning throughout the College of Engineering curriculum.

ME Advisory Board: Alumni Community Involvement

The Mechanical Engineering Advisory Board (MEAB) is composed of engineering professionals and UMass Lowell Mechanical Engineering alumni working in industry leadership roles, who help the department keep abreast of the latest developments occurring in the industries that employ mechanical engineers.